


So...911?

by PM_Writes



Series: Rookie cop meets lovable idiot [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Police, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dancer Lance (Voltron), Dorks in Love, Feelings, Fluff and Humor, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Keith (Voltron) is a Good Boyfriend, M/M, Police Officer Keith (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-15 23:56:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21026870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PM_Writes/pseuds/PM_Writes
Summary: Keith knows his job comes with risks. And he knows Lance is going to be furious if he misses this dance recital.What he doesn't know is that apparently Lance's profession comes with risks too.





	So...911?

**Author's Note:**

> Howdy!
> 
> Man, it's been forever since we posted a Voltron thing! Sorry if you were waiting on that, we just needed a bit of a breather. College is also a thing, so. 
> 
> But we're back! And with more shenanigans! And probably not a whole lot of medically accurate info!
> 
> Happy Reading!  
P and M

“Yo, babe, where the FUCK are you? I told you the community theater on second street. Four o’clock. Like thirty thousand times. We’re starting with ‘Baby Shark’ and if you miss it, I _will_ kill you. Love-you-so-much-bye.” Lance presses his cell more tightly to his ear as both of his hands are occupied with little girl hair. It’s kind of hard to cuss your boyfriend out on voicemail around children, which meant he’s stuck rage-whispering. 

Surrounded by excited four-year-olds, he’s dressed in a nice shirt and suspenders to match their own glittery skirts. The backstage of the community theater has seen better days, but it’s withstanding the cacophony of jittery children about as well as anything. 

This is Lance’s favorite part—the big dance recital at the end of each three-month course. He gets to dance with the kids (which really amounts to them spinning haphazardly in the vague shape of his choreography) while parents take photos and fawn over them. It’s nice. And he would appreciate it if his boyfriend could remember when the damn thing was happening, please and thank you.

Sighing, Lance ties off the girl’s hair and sends her off. He sends a quick text to Shiro asking him to remind Keith to haul his ass down here and tosses his phone in his dance bag.

With nothing more to do about Keith, Lance focuses on wrangling the girls into a warm-up circle. They sing a song together and Lance crouches to give them a nice pep talk complete with high fives. After running through the choreography one more time in the practice room, they’re ready to go. The director of the dance studio steps on stage while they all wait behind the curtain. 

The parents cheer when they march out single file. Lance calmly takes his place to the left, slightly in front so the girls can watch what he’s doing if they forget the steps.

...

Keith feels his phone buzzing in his pocket but valiantly ignores it as he rounds the corner. He knows it’s Lance. He knows he’s missing the recital, but right now he  _ has  _ to see this drug bust through or they lose track of a major supplier. He’ll make it up later with garlic knots and by sitting through a romantic movie without making any snide remarks. 

Shiro signals him from the other side of the alley and he moves in. Their perp has finally gotten out of the poorly disguised delivery truck and is approaching the buyer. It’s not a great layout to storm in on, but this will be their best chance.

His radio crackles with Shiro’s voice. “Go!” Keith and the rest of the tactical team rush in at once, weapons drawn. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the buyer slip out into an alley. 

“I’m going after him!” he calls to Shiro, hurtling over the fence and dropping into the alley. Keith whirls around the corner, only for the buyer to kick a metal barrel at him. He stumbles around it, but before he can regain his balance a loud crack rings out.

Keith hits the ground hard when his leg suddenly gives out. The buyer takes off, and a second later the pain hits and Keith realizes, “Ah, fuck. He shot me.” Leaning back against the wall he takes a deep breath. His pant leg is blooming red and the throbbing starts to set in.

“Keith!” Shiro ran and knelt next to him. “What happened?”

Keith sarcastically gestured to his obviously bleeding leg. “We sat down for a cup of tea and he promised never to do crime again—WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENED, SHIRO?!” He winces at the pain. 

“Damn it, I was trying to tell you to wait on backup.”

Shiro radios the rest of the team to get an ambulance and stretcher, examining the wound as he talks. At his gentle prodding, Keith hisses and slams his head against the wall. “Ooooooowwwwwwwhhhhhooooohooooohoooooowwwwwwww.”

Lance is gonna be so pissed at him.

...

The nurse comes in almost exactly as he wakes up from the anesthetic. They’ve put him in a two-person recovery room with a drawn curtain separating him from whatever poor sap is groaning on the other side. The bullet had to be removed and now his thigh lays outstretched and wrapped in bandages. Keith does not appreciate how little the hospital gown covers or how breezy it is. 

“Mr. Kogane? How are you?” 

“Uh. Fine, I guess. Woozy.”

She glances at his clipboard sharply and nods. “That’s normal. Now, unfortunately, we can’t get a hold of your emergency contact. Is there anyone else we can call?”

Keith blinks, fighting the lingering grogginess from the painkillers. “What do you mean you can’t get a hold of him? He should be home from his recital by now.”

Suddenly, the curtain hiding the other patient whips open violently and dramatically. “OH?! So you DID know when it was!”

Keith reels, blinking. “Lance?” There he was, laid up with a ridiculous amount of bandages around his forehead and over his bruised nose. “What  _ happened _ to you?” Lance continued to glare at him for an awkward amount of time. “Well?” Keith pressed.

Lance blinked. “What?”

“What the fuck happened to you?!”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Yes! That’s why I’m asking, you idiot!”

“Oh  _ I’m  _ the idiot? I’m not the one who got shot.”

“ _ What?” _

The nurse puts down his chart and blinks at them. “Oh. Well. I guess this is convenient? Unfortunate, but convenient.”

“If you’d bothered to show up for the recital I told you about  _ over a month ago _ , you wouldn’t have gotten shot.”

“ _ WHAT?”  _

“You heard me, mullet man.”

“Oh my god I was doing my fucking job, Lance. As a police officer.” 

“I don’t care how many pineapples were in danger!”

Keith squints at him. “What?”

The nurse sets his chart down behind him and starts toward the exit. “He has a concussion. And he’s on some painkillers. If you two are alright, I’ll come check on you later.” 

“Lance, can you answer my question?”

He yanks the curtain shut again with a flourish. “I plead the fifth!” Keith’s eye twitches and he takes a deep breath. Patience. Patience patience patience. 

“Lance. Hey, can you please tell me how you got hurt? I’m sorry I had to miss the recital.”

Slowly, and somewhat like a drunk toddler, Lance peers around the curtain. “Well…” Keith stretches an arm across the gap between their beds and gently tugs the curtain back. Lance stares at him for a moment, eyes flicking to his leg before he seems to refocus. “Okay so, we started our dance.”

“Baby Shark,” Keith interjects, just to prove that he  _ had  _ been listening before, thank you very much.

It seems to do the trick because Lance relaxes a little more and eases into his usual storytelling mode. “It was going really well. I was worried about Franny getting stage fright but she pulled through without any tears so it was awesome. And we dance, and all the parents seem really happy and stuff. So we get to the bow but like, this mom comes outta nowhere, like, screaming and stuff.”

Keith tilts his head. “Screaming?”

“Yeah! Like she fucking, I don’t even know! I got off the stage to see what was up and she marches up to me in her yoga pants like, ‘How dare you! I paid for my daughter to learn a rich tradition of dance and you teach her this nonsense?’ And I’m just like, ‘Lady, these classes have been going for three months. How did you not know what kind of dance it was?’ And oh man does that set her off! She honest to god starts throwing a temper tantrum in front of this entire theater full of parents and kids. So I ask her if she would like to speak to the studio director sometime later instead and she FUCKING HITS ME WITH HER PURSE.”

A spark of rage hits Keith then. “She  _ what. _ ”

Lance is leaning in now, waving his arms and pointing to his injured face. “YES. Motherfucking—! I have danced backup for ROMELLE. An international pop star. And this thirty-something mom with a choppy haircut and clumpy mascara goes off and just wails on me outta nowhere! And it hurt! I’m like, ‘What the hell do you have a brick in there?’ AND THEN SHE FUCKING DID. Well. It was a large ‘healing crystal’ but same difference! 

“And by then people were stepping in and getting her out and then I tried to back away but I tripped on a wire that wasn’t tapped down right and fell into a bunch of those metal folding chairs and then I was,” Lance pauses to suck in a breath, clearly working himself up and getting upset. “I was just even MORE banged up and then I had a concussion and my pinkie finger bent kinda weird and I know you were busy doing important work but you weren’t there and I just really wanted to like hug you to feel better.” 

He tears up a little, sniffling while Keith watches him with wide eyes. “Lance…”

“And now I just feel dumb and selfish because you got fucking SHOT and…” He sucks in a slightly watery breath. “That really scares me sometimes. And I don’t know how to tell you about that because I know you love your job but I don’t want you to get hurt. Or worse.”

Keith frowns, biting his lip at his partner’s distress. He’d guessed this conversation would come up eventually, but he hadn’t predicted how high on painkillers they’d both be when it came up. Fuck his head is still too fuzzy for this.

“Lance,” he says, patting the side of his bed. “I can’t get up, so come here.”

He blinks owlishly at him still very much embodying drunk toddler. For a moment Keith struggles to remember that this is the same man who can and  _ will  _ absolutely rail him into their mattress. Lance slowly unfolds his long limbs and wobbles a bit getting out of his own bed to cross the short distance between them. Careful not to jostle Keith’s bad leg too much, he slips under the covers and nuzzles his face into the crook of Keith’s neck, laying one palm over his chest. 

Keith reaches up to run a hand through his brown locks. “Your hair’s getting kinda long,” he comments absently. “You trying to grow a mullet?”

Lance holds him a little tighter. “As if. Only looks kind of good on you anyway.”

Keith hums, letting everything settle into the sounds of the medical machines beeping and whirring in the room. 

“I’m sorry I missed your dance. I really tried to make it. Promise.”

Lance sighs, closing his eyes. “I know you did. Maybe it was the meds, but I just keep thinking that if I’d made you drive there with me or show up earlier or something… I dunno. Just want you to be safe. That you’re always gonna come home to me and Blue.”

Keith doesn’t really know what to say to that. His job can be dangerous. There’s no helping that. But he wouldn’t trade it for anything. “I can’t promise you I won’t get hurt on the job.”

“...I  _ know. _ ”

Keith twists his head to kiss the top of Lance’s. “But I can promise I’ll always try my best to come back in one piece. I know what it’s like when someone vanishes from your life. And I don’t ever want to do that to you.”

“I know. I know you wouldn’t. I just wish I could do something about it.”

“Lance,” Keith whispers. “Look at me.” He does, making a half-assed attempt to wipe his teary eyes clear. “You already do.”

His brow furrows and his bottom lip juts out into what would be an adorable pout in any other circumstance. “How?”

Keith smirks. “You can ask Shiro. My injury rate has gone way down since I met you.”

Lance blinks. “What? Seriously?”

“Mmhmm.” He threads their fingers together over his chest. “Every time I’m out there I think, ‘Crap I can’t get hurt. Lance will get so pissed at me.’ Yeah, stuff like today will probably happen every now and then, but you have no idea how reckless I was before I had you to come home to.”

Lance looks a little quietly stunned, which might be the pain meds, but Keith likes to think that for once in his life he’s said just the right thing. That seems to be the case, given how Lance’s expression melts into that soft smile he loves. Gently, he presses their foreheads together, Keith leaning up to catch his mouth in an easy caress. Lance squeezes his hand once, kissing his nose as he pulls away.

“Thanks, Keithy-baby.” He settles back down into the hospital bed, put at ease and exhausted. “Is Shiro gonna pick us up?”

Keith closes his eyes, feeling his boyfriend’s warmth pressed against his side. “Mm. Probably. I’ll ask the nurse for my phone when she comes back.”

“Do you think he’d let us stop for burgers?”

“After this shitshow today? He’d better. You deserve a milkshake too.”

Lance snorts. “Damn right!”


End file.
